Everyone's favorite teen sleuthing squad is back, taking on Russian operatives, local corruption, and the latest supernatural evil to emerge from the Upside Down in the third season of Netflix's Stranger Things. Anyone who feared the series might be losing its luster, three years on, should rest easy: season three is just as good as the first—in some respects, even better.

The first season was set in November 1983, when an accident at a secret government lab opened an inter-dimensional portal and unleashed a supernatural threat from a different dimension onto the unsuspecting town of Hawkins, Indiana, in the form of a creature dubbed the Demogorgon. The source of that accident? A young girl with psychokinetic powers, known only as Eleven (Milly Bobby Brown). She escaped the lab and was befriended by a group of preteens whose friend Will (Noah Schnapp) mysteriously disappeared into an alternate dimension dubbed the Upside Down. They teamed up to find Will and defeat the monster that took him.

In season 2, we learned that monster was just the tip of the iceberg, and an even more powerful entity, dubbed The Mind Flayer, threatened the town, possessing poor Will, who was still traumatized by his stay in the Upside Down. Eleven managed to close the portal, but the final scene showed the Mind Flayer still lurking ominously in that dark mirror image of Hawkins.

In season three, Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Will, Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin), Max (Sadie Sink), and Eleven are growing up and pairing off, with all the usual melodrama that goes along with such scenarios. Mike's sister Nancy (Natalia Dyer) is still dating Will's older brother Jonathon (Charlie Heaton). Chief Jim Hopper (David Harbour) isn't dealing well with Mike and Eleven's teen romance, while Will's mother, Joyce (Wynona Ryder), is struggling to cope with the great personal loss she suffered last season.

Our plucky teen heroes learned a lot about the Mind Flayer over the course of two seasons. But the monster has also been learning about them, and it's back to take revenge—and it knows Eleven is the only real threat standing in its way. In the trailer, we learned that the Mind Flayer was never trapped in the Upside Down when Eleven closed the portal at the end of season two. It has been lurking in Hawkins this entire time, which means it has found a new host: Max's older stepbrother, Billy (Dacre Montgomery). And Billy is recruiting more townspeople as hosts, all with the aim of building a creature that can take out Eleven once and for all, leaving it free to flay the minds of pretty much everyone else alive.

Summer sleuthin'

"You can't have America without Erica."

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Maya Hawke joins the cast as Steve's Scoops Ahoy co-worker, Robin.

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The "Scoop Troop" (including Erica) almost steals the entire season.

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Teen sleuths on the trail of clues.

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Eleven and Max's budding friendship blossoms at the Starcourt Mall.

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Local newspaper reporter Bruce Lowe (Jake Busey) is an embarrassment to journalism even before the Mind Flayer arrives.

The best part of this new season is how tightly plotted it is; the pacing is well-nigh perfect, even if it takes several episodes before the purpose behind various developments becomes clear. Given the complicated narrative and sheer size of the cast—not to mention the need to give all the leads key roles in the approaching showdown—that's no small feat. There are a lot of moving pieces.

While Eleven, Mike, and the rest of the gang are just as delightful as ever, the colorful supporting cast frequently threatens to steal the show, most notably the "Scoop Troop." Dustin joins forces with reformed high school jock Steve Harrington (Joe Keery), Steve's co-worker at Scoops Ahoy ice cream parlor, Robin (Maya Hawke, spawn of Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke), and Lucas' precocious little sister Erica (Priah Ferguson). They discover the Russians are building a secret lab under the new Starcourt Mall, with the help of the corrupt Hawkins mayor, Larry Kline (Cary Elwes).

Further Reading

The other supporting standouts include investigative journalist/conspiracy theorist Murray Bauman (Brett Gelman), who still has that keen relationship insight he showed in season two, this time directed toward the unspoken tension between Joyce and Hopper. They need him to translate for Alexei (Alec Utgoff), a Russian engineer only too willing to dish on the machine they've been building under the mall to reopen the portal to the Upside Down—so long as he can watch Looney Toons and get a steady supply of cherry-flavored Slurpees.

As my colleague Nathan Mattise pointed out in his review of the first half of the season, Nancy and Jonathan are stuck in the weakest storyline, interning at the local paper. But even that leads somewhere in the end, as the pair (eventually) discovers that people are being possessed by the Mind Flayer. As in prior seasons, eventually all those threads converge and lead to a showdown with the Mind Flayer—this time at the Starcourt Mall.

(MAJOR spoilers below. Stop now if you haven't finished watching the season.)

Eleven has always been the Hawkins secret weapon when it comes to beating back the Mind Flayer, although the rest of the cast certainly contributed. In season three, the Duffer brothers up the ante by effectively taking Eleven out of the equation. She gets bitten by the Flay-Monster (a huge, shape-shifting thing with Graboid-like tentacles), and despite removing the parasite planted in her leg, that brief infection neutralizes her telekinetic powers.

A Planckian anachronism

Stranger Things has always celebrated nerddom and science, and it has mostly avoided obvious anachronisms in its homage to 1980s pop culture. But there was one scientific anachronism this season that caught the eagle eyes of scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Maryland. Joyce and Hopper must punch in a code to gain access to the two keys that will let them destroy the Russian machine and save the day. It's Planck's constant, but Murray Bauman's physics is a bit rusty, and he misremembers it. Dustin's not-so-imaginary girlfriend, Suzie, does know it, however: 6.62607004 (x 10-34 joule seconds, if we're being precise). NIST notes that this is actually the measured value in 2014. In 1984, the known value would have been 6.626176 x 10-34 joule seconds. We've come a long way since then in terms of the sensitivity of the instruments scientists use to measure such constants. The current value, as of 2018, is 6.62607015 x 10-34 joule seconds.

It's a savvy move, since otherwise the finale would have seemed too much like a retread from seasons past. In the end, it takes a village to defeat the Mind Flayer and save the world. Every main cast member brings some unique attribute to the table: Nancy's marksmanship, for instance; Jonathan's mechanical know-how; Dustin's supersized ham radio (dubbed "Cerebro"); and Lucas' love of powerful fireworks. Unable to rely on her powers, Eleven can still use her prior access to his memories, and her natural empathy, to reach whatever is left of Billy's mind, prompting him to redeem himself by making one last courageous stand against the beast that has hijacked his brain. The bully gets a hero's death.

The biggest twist in the season finale is Hopper sacrificing himself so that Joyce can blow up the Russian machine, closing the portal and cutting off the Flay-Monster from its energy source, the Upside Down. It's likely to break fans' hearts even more than the heroic death of lovable dweeb Bob Newby (Sean Astin) in season two. Like Billy, Hopper has his issues, stemming from the loss of his daughter and subsequent breakup of his marriage. He's been slowly crawling his way out of a dark emotional hole, thanks to Eleven and some nascent sparks with Joyce. The wordless look of anguish that passes between Joyce and Eleven when the latter realizes she's lost her father is far more devastating than any dialogue could have conveyed.

It's not over yet

Netflix hasn't officially renewed the series for a fourth season, but given the record-breaking viewer numbers, it's just a matter of time. A mid-credits scene hints that season four will likely delve further into the as-yet-unanswered Russian question—namely, why were the Russians trying to open the gate to the Upside Down after Eleven and the gang went to such great lengths to close it in season two? The scene takes us to a secret base in Russia, where two guards approach a prison door. "Not the American," one guard says. Instead, they drag off a Russian prisoner and lock him in a room with a captive Demogorgon, which proceeds to devour the screaming prisoner.

There has been much online speculation that "the American" refers to Hopper, since we never actually saw him die, plus loyal fans aren't quite ready to give up hope that David Harbour and his "dad bod" will be back at some point. Or perhaps it refers to Dr. Martin Brenner (Matthew Modine), the scientist who found and exploited Eleven in the first place. He supposedly died at the hands of the first Demogorgon in season one, but there's a brief mention in season two that Brenner is still alive.

The Duffer brothers recently hinted to Entertainment Weekly that season four will open up the storytelling to include plot lines outside of Hawkins—and that yes, the Russians and their captive Demogorgon will be playing a major role. We've already seen some of that in season two's "The Lost Sister" episode, where Eleven went to Chicago to find Kali (Linnea Berthelsen), another young woman with special powers—also the victim of Brenner's secret laboratory. It's no coincidence that the Byers family moved out of Hawkins, taking Eleven with them. We'll probably see Eleven grappling with the loss of her powers (hopefully just temporary) in the fourth season, and maybe Kali will come back into the picture, given how influential she was in helping Eleven realize the full potential of her telekinetic ability.

The Duffer brothers have also said that they are likely to end Stranger Things after a fourth (or possibly a fifth) season. Frankly, I'm not sure how much further they can raise the dramatic stakes before it all becomes a bit too familiar and repetitive. But given how well they developed everything for this fantastic third season, I'm willing to take season four on faith—for now.

So in less than a years time, the Soviets are able to not only smuggle in 100s of people into the country, make their way to Indiana and build an underground facility under the shopping mall, leading to the former Hawkins lab and only a couple teen agers are able to figure this out oh and then they’re all able to escape and assuming they took the Chief of Police with them as hostage

YEAH……. BULLSHEET

85 was the height of Cold War paranoia in this country, they’d be lucky to smuggle in one Russian agent

They wouldn’t have been able to accomplish any of that in a decade let alone less than a year

If they wanted to have a parallel experiment in Russia going on the same time as ours fine, but the rest of the story is weak sauce at best……..

What’s next the kids are home from college and have a reunion because the monster appears again

The Russians are just the replacement "bad guys" for the people who ran the lab in S1/2. They are totally tropey 80s cliche.

"They wouldn’t have been able to accomplish any of that in a decade let alone less than a year"

lack of regulations and near infinite funding goes a long way.

That said it is always funny in fantasy/sci-fi mash-ups the things our brains will accept("aliens" from another dimension creating a giant monster and mind controller people from a distance) but things that RUIN THE SHOW(foreign governments creating a vast complex underground in a years time with nobody noticing).

I felt the thing missing this season was that the monster was more or less a rehash of last year's monster. Once the audience figured out it was the Mind Flayer again, there wasn't as much discovery, which was the fun bit for me in seasons 1/2. First season and last season it was a new monster and they trickled out the hints.

Also, Eleven being a bit of a Deus Ex Machina for every fight except the last was a bit tiring. It became a bit like a Superman story: the invincible being needs to be disabled by (kryptonite / monster bite) in order to make the danger more convincing.

It was entertaining throughout and I'd still recommend watching it, but I didn't feel quite as engaged as S1/S2. The quality level was much steadier: there weren't any episodes as bad as S2's "Eleven goes to the big city" episode.

Stranger Things isn't set in the Actual 1980s: it is set in Movie 1980s. Complaining about the plausibility Soviets being able to pull off a Secret Underground Super Science Base in Indiana because of real world limitations is a bit like complaining that there are dragons and ice zombies in GoT because the War of the Roses was decidedly light on dragons. You are not identifying a narrative flaw. You are asking for an entirely different setting.

So in less than a years time, the Soviets are able to not only smuggle in 100s of people into the country, make their way to Indiana and build an underground facility under the shopping mall, leading to the former Hawkins lab and only a couple teen agers are able to figure this out oh and then they’re all able to escape and assuming they took the Chief of Police with them as hostage

YEAH……. BULLSHEET

85 was the height of Cold War paranoia in this country, they’d be lucky to smuggle in one Russian agent

They wouldn’t have been able to accomplish any of that in a decade let alone less than a year

If they wanted to have a parallel experiment in Russia going on the same time as ours fine, but the rest of the story is weak sauce at best……..

What’s next the kids are home from college and have a reunion because the monster appears again

It's an homage to movies like Red Dawn that also make no sense and are impossible. It's not supposed to be logical, it's supposed to be fun.

Season one was awesome from start to finish. Season two is great except for a couple of inexplicably weak episodes in the middle. The entire first half of season three is weak but to the shows credit it finshes really strong.

I sooo wanted Steve and Robin to hook up! My son and I were discussing this just the other day and both agree that Steve might be one of our favourite characters. Funniest line from Robin "So...how many little kids are you friends with?" hahaha

I genuinely laugh-cried when Dustin started up with the Neverending Story song, and I kept laugh-crying during the whole scene. That movie was such a huge part of my childhood (which was transposed about 3-4 years to the right from the Stranger Things kids—I would have been closer to Erica's age than the rest of the gang).

I thought it was a beautiful moment, and the cutaway reactions were brilliant. Exactly the right tone for the show—which, let's be honest, has always been about the wonder of being a kid (and especially an 80s kid) way more than it's been about monsters and shadowy government experiments.

This was a wonderful season, and I'm looking forward to re-watching it.

edit - Yeah, i think the USSR being able to build a mall underground in indiana is supposed to be dumb. As said upthread, this isn't the real 80s—this is Movie 80s.

And if you're upset about that, you should see the howling from the ham radio nerds about how Suzy and Dustin singing at the same time would actually have just caused a heterodyne and nobody would have been able to hear anything. Walkie-talkies are half-duplex, yo!

After seeing how season 3 played out, that weird digression in S02E07 is even harder to defend. Bad enough that it made a mess of S2's pacing, but it wasn't even setup for anything in S3. What the hell was the point of it?

I loved season 1. Season 2 was competent and entertaining. I want to love season 3, and it has so many great things, but I find the opponent to be less and less interesting each season.

As they've gotten away from the original thriller-monster with a sci-fi twist into more of a horror vibe, I feel they've done a disservice to the show. The Upside Down was the most interesting thing in the show, apart from the characters, and they've completely gone away from it. Big disappointment. The Mind Flayer sometimes acts intelligently, but often it's straight up zombie or blob horror tropes - is it supposed to be dangerous, other than the ability to spread? I get the respect for the 80s shows, but they were dumb fun.

I absolutely love the cast, and they had a lot of great character moments in season 3, but I want them to go back to what made season 1 great rather than taking it fully into horror. Leaving the Upside Down has been a mistake.

So in less than a years time, the Soviets are able to not only smuggle in 100s of people into the country, make their way to Indiana and build an underground facility under the shopping mall, leading to the former Hawkins lab and only a couple teen agers are able to figure this out oh and then they’re all able to escape and assuming they took the Chief of Police with them as hostage

YEAH……. BULLSHEET

85 was the height of Cold War paranoia in this country, they’d be lucky to smuggle in one Russian agent

They wouldn’t have been able to accomplish any of that in a decade let alone less than a year

If they wanted to have a parallel experiment in Russia going on the same time as ours fine, but the rest of the story is weak sauce at best……..

What’s next the kids are home from college and have a reunion because the monster appears again

The Russians built the entire mall as a cover for their plans, a mall takes longer than a year to build and there is zero reason to think they haven't been planning and building it for MUCH longer than that. Alexei implied they had tried/were trying in other locations.

Just because our exposure to the upside down began in 1983 doesn't mean the Russians hadn't been experimenting with it for much longer and all indications are that they had since they had developed a device to try to open it knowingly whereas Brenner only stumbled on it accidentally thanks to Eleven.

After seeing how season 3 played out, that weird digression in S02E07 is even harder to defend. Bad enough that it made a mess of S2's pacing, but it wasn't even setup for anything in S3. What the hell was the point of it?

I'm thinking the original plan was to expand upon it in the future but the viewer reaction to those couple of episodes was so overwhelmingly negative that the showrunners just scrapped it.

Chemistry between Robin and Steve was great. Graphics were good without over-dominating the show. The sexism directed at Nancy was just the right amount of social commentary without going down the preachy road.

The Upside Down was the most interesting thing in the show, apart from the characters, and they've completely gone away from it. Big disappointment....I absolutely love the cast, and they had a lot of great character moments in season 3, but I want them to go back to what made season 1 great rather than taking it fully into horror. Leaving the Upside Down has been a mistake.

I think that highlights the different reasons people watch the show, yeah. Speaking personally, I would have no problem if season 4 was 95% The Gang Hangs Out and Grows Up Together and 5% monster stuff. Watching Stranger Things for me has always been about being immersed in nostalgia and remembering the best parts of being 12 years old again before anything else—and it's made easier because the world of ST is basically the world I grew up in, minus the monsters and telekinesis.

Again, just speaking personally, I hope the show continues this course—I enjoyed S3 more than either previous season. Everybody's looking for something different from their entertainment, and S3 gave me pretty much exactly what I wanted.

I think that highlights the different reasons people watch the show, yeah. Speaking personally, I would have no problem if season 4 was 95% The Gang Hangs Out and Grows Up Together and 5% monster stuff. Watching Stranger Things for me has always been about being immersed in nostalgia and remembering the best parts of being 12 years old again before anything else—and it's made easier because the world of ST is basically the world I grew up in, minus the monsters and telekinesis.

Again, just speaking personally, I hope the show continues this course—I enjoyed S3 more than either previous season. Everybody's looking for something different from their entertainment, and S3 gave me pretty much exactly what I wanted.

Makes sense to me. I definitely enjoyed S3 a lot, I just think S1 was better. They've done a great job on the nostalgia - I'm square in the boat of enjoying it. They turned it up to 11 for Season 3 and it was glorious.

I felt in S1 that the 80s setting was secondary, and it's not secondary now. For some, it's a bigger plus than it is to me.

The Upside Down was the most interesting thing in the show, apart from the characters, and they've completely gone away from it. Big disappointment....I absolutely love the cast, and they had a lot of great character moments in season 3, but I want them to go back to what made season 1 great rather than taking it fully into horror. Leaving the Upside Down has been a mistake.

I think that highlights the different reasons people watch the show, yeah. Speaking personally, I would have no problem if season 4 was 95% The Gang Hangs Out and Grows Up Together and 5% monster stuff. Watching Stranger Things for me has always been about being immersed in nostalgia and remembering the best parts of being 12 years old again before anything else—and it's made easier because the world of ST is basically the world I grew up in, minus the monsters and telekinesis.

Again, just speaking personally, I hope the show continues this course—I enjoyed S3 more than either previous season. Everybody's looking for something different from their entertainment, and S3 gave me pretty much exactly what I wanted.

"ST is basically the world I grew up in, minus the monsters and telekinesis"

EXACTLY this.

Personally I need all of the supernatural stuff to keep me into the show but it really is amazing how well they nailed it with being a kid in the 80's.

If you are determined to find things to be upset about you will in anything. For example I am a Transformers nerd and that Ultra Magnus a) being able to move by itself and b) even existing a year before he would've done in the real world would absolutely trigger me if I was so inclined but I choose to see past that kind of thing and enjoy what was, a stellar piece of nostalgia fueled fun entertainment.

edit: yes I know Eleven was moving him but the intent was clearly that the toys being activated were motorized to begin with.

I thought it was a beautiful moment, and the cutaway reactions were brilliant. Exactly the right tone for the show—which, let's be honest, has always been about the wonder of being a kid (and especially an 80s kid) way more than it's been about monsters and shadowy government experiments.

This was a wonderful season, and I'm looking forward to re-watching it.

edit - Yeah, i think the USSR being able to build a mall underground in indiana is supposed to be dumb. As said upthread, this isn't the real 80s—this is Movie 80s.

Spoiler: show

Problem: the tone of the duet exists in the same season where people, including little kids, were graphically liquefied into goo material to build the Mind Flayer's corporeal body.

As for the Soviet presence being stupid...I remember this very site offering a review of ST S1 talking about the great strengths of ST being that the trope/80s nostalgia invocations were used in intelligent and creative ways as opposed to rehashed and dumb ways. Go figure.

And why are the Russians even doing this? Didn’t they get the memo about ending the world.

If they unleash the monster in the USA and just let it free, then they've defeated the evil capitalists :-) . Until the Russians revealed that Hawkins was somehow special wrt upsidedown access, I figured that releasing the monster into the USA was the motive for them doing their gate stuff in the states.

I'm actually reading "The Dead Hand" right now, which is about real-world American and Russian WMD efforts in the 80s. The Russians apparently had an extremely aggressive bioweapons program, so Russians trying to unleash an unstoppable biological weapon would be period-appropriate.

After seeing how season 3 played out, that weird digression in S02E07 is even harder to defend. Bad enough that it made a mess of S2's pacing, but it wasn't even setup for anything in S3. What the hell was the point of it?

You know, 45 minutes to teach El to "dig deep" or realize she liked her friends or something. It was too long and didn't belong there.

the Mind Flayer was never trapped in the Upside Down when Eleven closed the portal at the end of season two. It has been lurking in Hawkins this entire time

I'm not sure this is entirely accurate.

There was some mention of cutting off the head killing the snake, in that closing the door cut off the Mind Flayer's access, so any remnant leftover would just fall to the ground harmlessly. Then when the door was cracked again, the true, big bad Mind Flayer from Will's visions couldn't get through yet, but it did re-establish contact with its remains which manifested itself in a mini Flayer that we saw in the Steel factory and Starcourt Mall.

This is further supported upon the exposition we got during the chase scene with Jonathan and Nancy in the hospital, when the two dead bodies-turned-blobs joined into one mini-mini Flayer.

As for the Soviet presence being stupid...I remember this very site offering a review of ST S1 talking about the great strengths of ST being that the trope/80s nostalgia invocations were used in intelligent and creative ways as opposed to rehashed and dumb ways. Go figure.